Had this same experience - using a Macbook Air 1.7 GHz i5, 4Gb RAM, 256 Flash. SD mysteriously stopped working several weeks ago. Didn't correlate it with install of Windows 7 and VMWare Fusion to access the Bootcamp partition. Did bascially the same thing as this post - boot Windows 7 on VMWare, enable and capture the SD slot for Windows, insert card (it will be recognized), gracefully eject card in Windows, tell VMWare not to map the SD slot and set it to give control of SD to OS X when things are inserted, disable the future capture of SD by Windows. Now, when I insert SD cards in OS X, it recognizes them consistently. Clearly a deep config setting that is slightly confused or not released/re-written when you install Bootcamp and port it to a VMWare Fusion session.

Since my solution (blowing out the slot) now does not work for me, and I have tried everything else, I tried zapping the PRAM. No go. Absolutely nothing. So many solutions offered and yet I have not tried one that works (and keeps working). C'mon Apple, step up to the plate and find us a solution--one that works for everyone all the time!

I had the same problem after owning my MBP for 1.5yrs. I had ran Parallels for about 1yr of that. Come to find out that is what made my card reader not work yesterday, i uninstalled Parallels and went into the device settings, selected card reader, then unchecked it and it made my card reader work again. Thanks for the advice 2re1979!!! I am now removing Parallels for good and going to do boot camp.

Update: I am unable to remove Parallels as it makes my SD card reader not work again....looks like I have to keep it installed.

I had the same problem on my black MacBook running 10.6.8. My Kingston 8GB SDHC card, inserted into a SanDisk MobileMate SD+ reader, would be detected in the Finder, but not in iPhoto. I simply deleted the cache in the com.apple.iPhoto folder by going to Macintosh HD>Users>(me)>Library>Caches>com.apple.iPhoto, then dragging the tiny file within that folder to the trash. Empty the trash, restart, and now my 8GB card, when inserted into the reader, automatically opens iPhoto and gives the normal option to Import - just the way it's supposed to.

Thanks for taking the time to post your solution, Mark. I had the same frustrating issue on my black MacBook. Since deleting the Cache.db file in my com.apple.iPhoto file, my issue has been fully resolved. Suddently, life is good again.

The other problem still remains--not showing up in the Finder at all. This has fustrated me to no end. I can't use my MacBook Pro the way I had hoped to when it comes to downloading from my camera's cards. It has been literally months and months that this discuss has been running and the silence from Apple is deafening!! Where is the renowned customer service and care?

Not sure if this helps but I am having the same issue on my iMac since installing Lion. Not an ideal fix but I put the Disk Utility as an icon on the desktop. (You can find it under Applications/Utilities/ Disk Utility). Each time I put a card in the slot I open Disk utility and select the card then click on the "Mount" icon. It now appears in iPhoto or imovie as it used to do automatically. A pain but a fix until Apple resolves the bug.

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